Featured

The desert called so we pulled out the long boats and headed down the Baja way, first loading enough boats to take full advantage of both coasts, then cramming the truck full of every camping comfort it would take, right down to a hand-cranked margarita blender.

Featured

Sean Morley knows a few things about going fast. He honed his forward stroke technique as a flatwater sprint racer on the British junior national team, but has made his biggest mark traveling far and fast in challenging conditions. He’s held speed records for crossing the Irish Sea, circumnavigating Vancouver Island, and paddling 4,500 miles around Great Britain and Ireland, solo.

Featured

Last October I spent five days engulfed in the beauty of the Adirondack Mountains, paddling the lakes of the Saint Regis Canoe Area with a couple good friends. This was our first overnight paddling experience in the area; I came away with a few bits of knowledge to pass on to the next paddlers planning this perfect fall escape.

Featured

The Maine Island Trail Association (MITA), which oversees a 375-mile waterway for small boaters from the New Hampshire border to Canada, just got a shot in the arm from L.L. Bean. The venerable outdoor gear and apparel maker, founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean, recently gave MITA and its Wild Islands Campaign a $100,000 grant to support its efforts to protect the trail system. It’s far from the first funds the company has awarded to the association. In 1987, L.L.Bean issued a grant to create the association, in partnership with the Maine Department of Conservation and the Island Institute. It was from this that both MITA and the Maine Island Trail — America’s first recreational water trail, an establishment founded on the notion that visitors could be entrusted with the islands’ care — were born. “For decades, L.L.Bean and the Maine Island Trail Association have shared the common goal of being good stewards of the environment,” says L.L.Bean chairman Shawn Gorman. “It’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure that we all have clean, pristine and accessible places to recreate in the outdoors. The Maine Island Trail Association is to be commended for their efforts to make the great outdoors even

Featured

A month into their ambitious nine-month, 5,200-mile route, the six-man Rediscover North America crew highlights the first 27 days paddling up the Atchafalaya River, and crossing over to begin the long slog up the mighty Mississippi.

Landfall: Aleksander Doba Reaches South America

(Ed’s note: This story has been updated, 10:40 a.m. PST, Feb. 4, with photos just received by C&K.)

By Conor MihellPublished: February 2, 2011

After 99 days at sea, trans-Atlantic sea kayaker Aleksander Doba of Poland made landfall on a sandbar near the small community of Acara, Brazil, at approximately 2 p.m. local time today.

Polish sea kayaking enthusiast and blogger Bartosz Sawicki confirmed in an email with C&K that Doba was awaiting high tide to complete a three-mile paddle up a small river to Acara. “[The] support team talked with Aleksander. Now he is paddling upstream to the Acarau village, [where an] official welcome party is organized,” Sawicki said.

Earlier, Sawicki wrote that Doba’s partron, Jerzy Arsoba, had emailed him with this message: “They see that Aleksander is walking and pulling [his] kayak”—apparently on a sandbar—”about 2km from the beach. Because of tides, water level is very low. I don’t know anything more. We should wait for final confirmation that he is safe.”

Doba, 64, departed Dakar, Senegal on the west coast of Africa in late October in an attempt to complete the first continent-to-continent crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by sea kayak. The 3,345-mile expedition was plagued by bad weather and opposing ocean currents right to the end, when offshore winds and coastal currents forced an exhausted Doba to battle his way to shore northwest of his intended target of Fortaleza, Brazil. Acara is about 100km northwest along the Brazlian coast from Fortaleza.

Doba’s effort is believed to be the longest open-water crossing ever undertaken by a kayaker, roughly 99 days, 6 hours. The previous longest kayak crossing belonged to Peter Bray, 76 days in 2001, from Newfoundland to Ireland.